Agents & Editors: A Q&A With Agent Molly Friedrich

How should an author choose which agent to go with?
First of all, I don't think an author
should approach an agent before they have a manuscript. I had an author come to
me who didn't think he'd be ready for seven to ten years. He'd had a huge first
success and he was leaving his agent and wanted to sign on with somebody new. I
asked him why he was leaving his agent. It was clear the agent had done a
wonderful job selling the book, a wonderful job on foreign rights. And now the
author wanted someone new to exchange letters with him—talk to him, be his
friend, be his sponsor—for five years or seven years before his next book was
ready? He said, "I've left that agent because I want someone more prestigious."
I said, "I don't want you. I don't want to read what you've written. I don't
want to read what you will write in seven years. I don't want you. I want you
to go back to that first agent and show some loyalty, because you have a really
shabby reason for leaving that agent. That agent has done everything possible
to secure and establish your career. You've done something too—you've written
a good book. You have every reason to write a second good book. But for you to
leave because you want someone more prestigious? That sucks. Bye!" He wrote me
a letter saying he admired my moxie.

But
you know what's really sad? That author did go with someone else, a very
well-known agent, and that very well-known agent sold the book for three
hundred thousand dollars. So you know what? I'm sorry to say it, but this
author was sort of right. Not right to leave his agent, but right to think that
going with an agent who was very well known might have helped him. We'll never
know what the poor, sad, sorry, hardworking first agent who would have gone to
bat for life for this guy would have done. But would that editor have paid ten
times what the first book was sold for? I don't know, but it really stinks.

So how is an author supposed to know whom to choose?
Okay, so the first rule is that an author should never
approach an agent until they have something. If I met every person who wanted
to just have a chat before they sent their book, I'd go out of business. If
they have a book and they are sending it out, they should always say in the
letter if they are doing multiple submissions. That is common courtesy. I would
also say that I want to know the circumstances under which I am reading
something. Have you sent this to ninety-five other people? Have you sent this
to one other person? Do I have this exclusively? Because if I push aside my own
reading, which is the tyranny of all our lives, in order to be fast, at least
tell me what I need to do. The other thing is that the author should agree—if
the author is playing consumer here and sending it to five agents who want to
read it—that he's not going to make a decision until he has heard from all
five people. You should respect an agent's time. Do we get paid for our time?
No. Respect a busy agent's time. The thing I want to kill someone for is when I
read something over the weekend and I'm about to pick up the phone to tell them
it's the most wonderful book since War and Peace, and they say, "Oh,
sorry, I've signed on with Joe Blow who called on Sunday morning." No. No, no,
no, no, no. That is really wrong. Be fair. If you are going to put us on the
spot, give us all a fair chance.

The
first thing you are going to look for is: Who responds? The second thing to
look for is: What do they say? And what do they think about the book? Now this
is where it gets murky, because a lot of agents get the author by saying, "Oh,
it's wonderful! Wonderful, wonderful, wonderful!" Then they sign the author on
and begin the hard work of getting the book into shape. That tends not to be my
style. I tend to be very up-front about what I think the book needs from the
very beginning. And I have lost authors because of it. Sometimes I wonder,
"Should I become dishonest?" Should I say, "It's great!" to get the author and
then deconstruct the manuscript over the course of twenty painful weeks? I
don't know what the answer is. I know you always have to be true to yourself
and your own style, and my style is to be utterly frank about what I think the
manuscript requires, how I would position the book, and what I would do on its
behalf.

Then
the author may say, "Oh God, I can't decide! You're all so wonderful!" If
that's the case I would say to get on a plane and come meet us. Figure it out.
You should never be afraid to talk to your agent. Some authors are terrified of
their agents. On the other hand, there are some agents who have very different
styles and are overly friendly. They become "the girlfriend." They become so
close with their authors that we arrive at what shrinks call "the boundary
problem." This is also problematic, because then the agent loses the authority
they are supposed to have in the author's life.

What kind of questions should an author ask potential
agents?
You are fully within your rights to ask an agent whom else
he represents. You are also within your rights to ask an agent to tell you
about a couple of authors whose books he's sold recently. You can't live on
your laurels and sit around bragging about your top five best-known clients.
"What have you sold recently, and how'd it go?" And maybe ask, "What did you
love that you weren't able to sell?" Everyone thinks I sell everything I touch.
Wrong, wrong, wrong. There's loads of stuff I take on and don't sell. It's
extremely painful. So I think it's fair to talk about these things. I think you
want to see what kind of a match you are. Can you talk with this agent frankly?
Do you feel comfortable?

But
it also goes the other way. It's a mutual interview process. There are many
people I talk to and realize that I may love this person's work but I do not
love this person. This person is going to
be trouble. Big trouble. I had one author who I took on. It was a beauty
contest, and I won her. She was a nonfiction writer, and I don't have much
nonfiction, so I want nonfiction. She'd been published before and had a raft of
fabulous journalistic credits to her name. I worked with her a little bit on
the proposal—you know, shoring it up—but she was a true pro and didn't need
much help. I got three offers and sold the book for six figures. It was great.
But by the time the contract arrived, this woman had so exhausted me that I
called her up and said, "I'm not going to tell the publisher this because I don't
want the publisher to be nervous
about it, but once the contract comes in and it's signed, I want you to know
that I am leaving you. I'm giving you my full 15 percent. You can take it. I
want you to thrive. But you have exhausted me. I'm sorry, but it just isn't a
good match." Nonfiction books don't take six months to write. They take years
to write! And the prospect of having this woman in my life for years filled me
with such a chill that I thought, "I can't do this. Let's solve this."

Tell writers one
thing they don't know about editors, something that you know and they don't.
I would say that
they must view the fawning, deeply complimentary praise that marks the honeymoon
phase of their relationship with an editor for what it is. They must not buy into
it. They must realize that editors will say almost anything to get a book when
they have to have a book. The problem is that what you need from editors is to
have them be there for the long haul. Not just the long haul of the publication
process, but for the next book and the book after that as well. When the first
review comes in and it's terrible, you need your editor to say, "That fucker!
He didn't understand the book at all. Ignore it and go on." An editor needs to
be deeply, lastingly loyal to an author and a book that he decides to buy,
because bad things will happen and that loyalty will be tested.

Tell me what you're looking for when you're reading a
first novel or memoir.
That's so easy. I'm looking for the
first page to be good. Then I'm looking for the second page to also be good.
Really! The first page has to be good so that I will go to the second page and
the third and the fourth. It's true that sometimes I get all the way to the end
knowing that I'm going to turn a book down—I've come under the book's spell
but the spell is not holding me—and then I may feel committed to reading it
and showing off with a fabulous editorial letter. That does happen. But the
main thing I look for is immediate great writing.

I
think the world of memoir is divided into two camps. One camp is the memoir of
an unbelievably fascinating life. Huge! Can you top this? Death, famine,
child abuse, all kinds of terrible and extraordinary events...but the author
can't write. In the other camp you get beautiful writing—magnificent
writing—with a kind of pointillist attention to every marvelous detail in the
course of a life in which nothing interesting has happened. It's usually one or
the other. So when you can combine those two things in one book—an interesting
life and good writing—then you have pay dirt. But it's hard. It's hard to sell
memoir, especially if it's not big in an obvious way.

What about with fiction?
Fiction is being published less and less. The stakes are
higher. All editors say the same thing to me. They say, "I've got money to
spend. I'd really love to do business with you. I'd love to buy a book from
you." That's code. What they mean is they'd love to buy a book, for which they
can possibly overpay, that is big in obvious and immediate ways. And most books
are not big in obvious and immediate ways. They simply aren't. Something has to
change.

I
have sold books for many millions of dollars and I have sold books for two
thousand dollars and pretty much everything in between. I have experienced the
fantastical joys of selling books for a whole lot of money. It is a joyous
moment. But it isn't necessarily the best thing in the world. It isn't. Perhaps
it's blasphemous for me to say that. But if you sell a first novel for a
million dollars, you are putting so much pressure on that book to perform at a
certain moment, in a certain season, at a certain level. And most books don't
perform immediately. Something, I think, has to give.

If
I'm going to say that maybe we shouldn't take a million dollars for a first
novel, that we should take less money, then it seems to me that we all have to
think more imaginatively—we agents and editors and publishers, all of us
collectively. I think the place to do that is in the royalty rate. You're
always taught, coming up as an agent, that the royalty is the thing in the
boilerplate that essentially doesn't change. You know: 10 percent on the first
five thousand copies, 12.5 percent on the next five thousand, 15 percent after
that. We are told that these percentages are pretty inviolate, certainly for
most fiction. But where is it written that you have to stop at 15 percent? If
you don't want the burden to be up front, with the large advance that sunders
all plans if it doesn't work out, then change the royalty structure. Give the
writer 20 percent. Go on, do it! And if you're a small publisher, definitely do
it. Hold on to your writers!